The Last Days of the Big Apple Circus

Here’s another way that 2016 feels like a break in the space-time continuum: The Big Apple Circus tents are absent from Lincoln Center this holiday season. After almost four decades, the nonprofit announced in July that it had run out of money, and that a desperate $2 million fund-raising drive had fallen woefully short. Which means there are a lot of sad clowns out there. Children who dream of running away to join the circus will have to Google another roadshow.

Vincent Tullo’s images, taken at performances in New Jersey and in Queens, are from the circus’s final season, when the red ink was starting to build up.

“You can’t beat it,” said Mr. Tullo, 22, whose mother used to take him to the Big Apple Circus when he was young. “It was hard to take pictures sometimes because it was so mesmerizing. You get lost. I couldn’t look away.” The hula-hoop woman who kept adding rings until she became invisible, the acrobatic Energy Trio who plied themselves like human pipe cleaners, never touching the ground with their feet — all spoke to the child in him. None ever let on that the end might be near.

“You’re in a cheap folding chair and there’s dirt in front of it and you can see the tent flapping in the wind,” he said. “It’s so homey. I think that was my favorite thing.”

And yet such thrills do not necessarily pay the bills, as the barkers say. The Big Apple Circus once relied on money from private performances for corporate groups, especially banks, but after the financial crisis of 2008 — and after the federal government used tax dollars to save these banks from failure — such perks dwindled, and with them, the circus’s bottom line. “On the last day, one of the people said, ‘Yeah, we’re pretty much done,’” Mr. Tullo said. But even on that day, the show went on.

A version of this article appears in print on December 18, 2016, on Page MB8 of the New York edition with the headline: The Last Days for the Circus. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe